Holiday for the Anniversary of Ghandi's 60th Birthday

Everyone was celebrating all day, October 2nd, here for the 60th anniversary of Gandhi's (or Grandfather as Indian children like to call him) birthday. We had a very relaxing day watching two Tamil movies on TV- a major change of pace from our normal busy days! The kids all loved it, all sitting on the ground in front of one of the houses with a TV set-up outside. We passed out some Starburst candies too which were enjoyed. One of the Tamil actors was Arjun- a famous movie "hero" as the kids call it, who everyone loves. The plot was hard to follow, as we could only understand some occasional English phrases stuck in Tamil dialogue. For example, one character exclaimed in English, "I admire your style of dress!" and "Law and order!" was repeated a few times. Our favorite part of course were the dancing scenes that happen every time after something romantic happens. The kids loved it and were laughing the whole time.
Later we thought it would be fun to blow up a soccer beach ball and play a sort of version of handball with it. This was greatly successful for all of about 20 minutes, when ball met the pile of sticks full of thorns and was no more. Trying to play with a deflated ball wasn't quite the same, though we tried of course.
Later this evening, we did English lessons with the boys. We took a map of the world, which the kids love, and had them search for countries starting with a particular letter. Kelsey then worked on spelling and pronouncing each name with the younger boys, while Paige told the older boys facts about each country. We discussed every country they found. But also Sri Lanka and the fighting there, along with the fighting in Kashmir with Pakistan. The little kids were quite passionate about Kashmir belonging to India and their dislike for Pakistan. We spent a lot of time trying to foster some positive feelings for our Pakistani neighbors, but this will definitely need to be something we work on. Maybe we can find a book in the Bethania library with pictures of friendly, cute Pakistani children, or if anyone wants to mail us some we can use in our next lessons.